Tuesday 6th June: Cliff Walk Day
It was a much warmer start to the day, and without the awful wind, which was good news for us as we planned to do for the very popular 3 1/2 mile Cliff Walk along the Newport coastline. This route takes you past many of the mansions that have the luxury of enjoying a seafront location. There would have been a blue sky today except for the smoke haze currently plaguing the region again. Smoke from the Canadian wildfires were back on the scene triggering local air quality alert warnings.
The Newport Cliff walk is graded into three categories; easy, medium and hard and it ranges from being a paved path to unpaved and then on to to a bit of a rock scramble. They say it takes about 2 to 3 hours to complete and that was pretty much spot on as it took us 2 1/2 hours with only a few stops for photos.
Whilst you do become a bit immune to the grandeur from seeing one luxury home after another, it’s hard to believe that these could ever have just been considered little ‘summer cottages’ for the elite to enjoy during the summer break. These homes were colossal and palatial mansions on a scale that is hard to fathom.
The only really amusing thing along this walk was that we saw a young man at the start with bare feet, and a feather stuck in his long hair, and we pondered the wisdom of this act; the feet not the feather. However, some hours later, we saw him again at the end of the walk, still with bare feet, and looking none the worse for it. I have no idea how he was able to do this without shoes but it did remind me of my nephew, Elliot, who similarly used to the walk the planet sans shoes.
We both used an audio guide, produced by the same guy who did our driving history tour from yesterday, and this was quite beneficial. It was a bit repetitive in parts but there were other bits and pieces of information that made the walk all the more interesting. I would suggest downloading this tour, or something similar, if you’re ever in this part of the world and doing this cliff walk.
The end of the cliff walk leaves you down the bottom of Newport but there is a free No 67 trolley that shuttles back-and-forth every 30 minutes during the day to take people to the near the start (a 10 minute walk away) to the finish as well as making various other stop along the way. This was a great service and we used the shuttle to travel from the end of the cliff walk back to near our accommodation.
We had a quiet afternoon back at our lovely apartment before heading back down to the Harbour front area for some shopping and then on to dinner. A late afternoon storm developed which cut things a bit short for us however and ‘forced’ us into Buskers Irish Pub where Mark realized he now prefers IPAs to the Irish stuff. Our dinner booking at Brick Alley Pub wasn’t until 6.30 pm but we decided to head there early. This venue had a good rating and I had received a message stating that the dress code was ‘Business Casual’. So, suitably dressed, we arrived into a space where most other patrons were in shorts and T-shirt’s! It was not what we hade been expecting despite the venue having the word ‘Pub’ in its name. We had thought it was going to be some trendy gastro-pub but, no, it was just your bog-standard pub with pub food and no Apple Pay. It was then when I had my little epiphany that not all Google ratings are the same. This place had scored a 4.7 but this would not be a 4.7 back in Australia. I’m speaking generally here but our experience through Canada and the USA, thus far, has only reinforced just how lucky we are in Australia and what a relatively sophisticated cafe and restaurant scene our country enjoys. We, Australia I mean, are punching well and truly way above our weight in so many different categories of service.
Rant over now but, on our walk home from dinner, we passed by the oldest Synagogue in America; the Touro Street Synagogue. This was built in 1759 but the congregation was founded in 1658. Just thought I’d throw that in before signing off for the night. Tomorrow is our last full day and we are going to visit another Vanderbilt mansion.
Wednesday 7th June: Marble House Day
It was a beautiful morning in Newport although there was still a thin veil of smoke haze blocking the blue of the sky from being fully revealed. Mark went out for a bike ride and I took a walk along pretty Bellevue Avenue. It was our last day in Newport and our plan was to visit another of the Vanderbilt mansions, Marble House.
Marble House was commissioned by William K Vanderbilt as a present for his wife, Alva, and completed in 1892. William was the younger brother of Cornelius II Vanderbilt, who had commissioned The Breakers and as with The Breakers, Marble House was designed by William Morris Hunt and at a cost of $11 million. Marble House was so named as it contains 500,000 cubic feet of marble with Alva modeling the construction on Versailles. It was not nearly as large or as impressive as The Breakers but still had some very opulent rooms. We used the same Newport Mansions audio guide and this made the visit much more interesting, however, being a much smaller house, this tour lasted just over an hour.
We then caught the No 67 free trolley back home for a short break before deciding to visit Providence, which was a 40 minute drive north. I’d heard it was pretty and worth visiting and there was a self guided driving tour available, by the same guy who did the Rhode Island one, so we decided to do this to fill in our last afternoon.
The reality of Providence was very different to what we’d imagined; it was just another big city. Navigating the busy streets and trying to follow the audio guide and map proved to be too much of a challenge, and it was nigh on impossible to pullover to view the places being discussed, so we cut the tour short and headed back home. What a waste of an afternoon.
We arrived home by 3.30 pm but decided to just bunker in for an early night as we head to Mystic tomorrow.
